We are delighted that we can now make available five of the case studies written by researchers across the humanities and social sciences. More will be available via this blog soon.
At the beginning of the project we had a number of aspirations for what the case studies could achieve. Firstly, of course, we wanted to show the variety of research that could be undertaken across different disciplines with web archives. Secondly, we wanted the researchers to give us feedback on the interface to the archive that the project was developing (this they did at monthly meetings) and we are very grateful to them for attending and giving their views; this process improved the interface markedly. Thirdly we hoped that some of the researchers might become advocates for web archiving among their peers.
The last is already being realised. At a conference on web archiving in Aarhus in June, no fewer than four of our researchers gave papers. Given their enthusiasm, we are sure that they will also present their work at events in their own subject areas.
The first five case studies we are marking available are: